ABSTRACT
This chapter locates the restructuring in Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) within the wider context of new regionalism and globalisation. ECOWAS emerged during the waning days of the ‘old regionalism’; that is the phenomenon of regional integration between the 1950s and 1970s. The ‘new’ regionalism emerged in the late 1980s as part of the responses to the end of the Cold War and the transformation of the global political economy. Locating ECOWAS within the globalisation-regionalism dynamic invariably brings to the fore the contradictions inherent in globalisation; that is the simultaneous integration and fragmentation and the marginalisation of the South. Exploring the relationship between globalisation and regionalism is important because the two phenomena bring together the economics and politics of contemporary global restructuring. The impact of both globalisation and regionalism are uneven. The West African sub-region is used as an example to illustrate the wider marginalisation of the South in general, and the myth of globalisation.
